University of Baltimore seeking free online auditors now for my experimental Spring 2013 seminar on The King Years

I will teach a weekly history seminar this spring term at my home town University of Baltimore. The course will explore the modern civil rights era at its transformative peak, 1954-68.

This class will be experimental and exciting for me in several respects. Most important, the in-class seminar will be accessible without charge via Web connection to a selected group of registered auditors. They will pay no fees and receive no college credit. All we seek from auditors is candid feedback about the content and delivery of this special prototype course.

We hope to develop for the future an in-class seminar that can be shared via the Web by an expandable group of participants from diverse places and backgrounds, registered individually or through institutions for credit. Therefore, for this trial run, the University of Baltimore will accept interested auditors from a wide variety of groups: students and teachers (high school through college), non-degree candidates, general lay readers, and specialists in subject areas from race relations and social movements to government and nonviolence.

Several of the technical departments at the University of Baltimore have cooperated to make the in-class seminar available via the Web to registered auditors simultaneously, by live-stream connection, and also by delayed retrieval and review.

I have taught a similar course several times before, most recently last spring as a visiting Honors professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. Those courses carried intensive reading assignments from texts that included my 2,306-page King-era trilogy. This new course is designed to introduce the most salient events and issues through a more compact core curriculum. The weekly readings are built around the eighteen chapters of my newly released book, The King Years, which is a 190-page guided distillation of the longer work.

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Praise for the King Era Trilogy

“The crowning achievement of Branch’s King trilogy is to show anew the moral power of [nonviolent] philosophy.”
– The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“A thrilling book, marvelous in both its breadth and its detail. There is drama in every paragraph.”
– Anthony Lewis, The New York Times Book Review

Pillar of Fire

“By the time you have finished [Pillar of Fire], you feel almost as if you have relived the era, not just read about it.”
– Richard Bernstein, The New York Times

“This is jet-propelled history.”
– James Goodman, The Boston Globe

Parting the Waters

“Right out of the pages of our lives….Compelling portraits, placed in the excitement of a period when oppressed and powerless people moving together changed themselves and their country profoundly and permanently.”